NutriWine ~ Wellbeing: Health - Climate Change

NutriWine

Ralph Quinlan Forde

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Published in 2011 by Health E Books Limited

Smashwords Edition

NutriWine Copyright 2011 Ralph Quinlan Forde

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

The author asserts the moral right under section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Book Cover Copyright Francis Lanuza

British Library C.I.P.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-9571318-3-5

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

Disclaimer

The publisher and author make it clear that this work is for general use and may not be substituted for medical advice by a qualified medical professional. Nothing in this book should be construed as an attempt to offer medical advice, opinion or engage in the practice of medicine. The author and publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book.

Sales enquiries please contact rqf@nutriwine.net

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To

Professor Leo Pyle

Ian Scott Naomi Mathew

Isco

Javier & Checho

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Table of Contents

Preface

1: The Wine Mind

2: The Tasting Lab

3: Soil to the Glass

4: Wine Transfusion

5: Wine as Preventative Medicine

6: Artificial Intelligence Vineyard

7: SEO Wine 2.0

8: The Green Connoisseur

9: Wine in Climate Change

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

The Author

Preface

Champagne?! You treat depressives with Champagne?...Wow.

Those were the words of the high end magazine editor in response to my answers in an interview, born out of a story beginning to circulate about my clinical work. Yes indeed, I do treat depressives with Champagne. You see, wine has a very long tradition in preventative medicine world wide and particularly in France. A fashion photographer who also worked for the magazine came to consult with me. As part of the healing protocol for them, I included a glass of Champagne a day for two weeks, to lift my patients’ spirits.

When the magazine found out about this they ran straight to the phone.

So welcome to the world of wine - a $107 billion industry. The USA is now the biggest consumer of wine today, overtaking France and Italy. The global wine industry will soon produce over 27 billion liters of wine a year. Wine enthusiasts in the USA alone are some 80 million people. Thomas Jefferson, American President who was a wine enthusiast and visionary founder of the republic, would be very proud indeed.

French physicians actually prescribe wine for different ailments as part of a preventative medicine protocol with their patients. This long and ancient tradition of wine as a preventative medicine should not be lost, which is why I am writing this book. We need to re-engage western medicine with wine and its health benefits. Wine has been a big part of the global materia medica for millennia.

Medicine without wine has actually cut itself off from its ancestral lineage of integrative and preventative medicine. Prohibition caused the impasse between wine and health, but wine has always been a culture of moderation and studies demonstrate this. A whole generation of physicians have been educated without ever having been taught the health benefits of moderate wine drinking. With one out of eight Americans soon to develop diabetes we need to be open to all solutions, even natural ones like wine, to prevent this epidemic.

The French Paradox is taken up with why French people eat more fat daily than Americans but suffer less heart disease in a modern world. They are also slimmer. Much slimmer. The French are not haunted by obesity the same way as in the USA. Medical research points to the effect wine has on the French in keeping them healthy and they live longer too. Wine contains some powerful biochemicals such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids and especially antioxidants that can boost peoples’ health. These are in a form that nature designed and not what marketeers have invented. Wine contains natural vitamins, not chemical ones. Some people even say wine is close to the composition of blood in ways.

We need to reconnect people to the blood of the earth once again. Some of the healthiest longest living cultures of the world regularly drink wine in their diets. There is no doubt now that diet plays a crucial role in health according to scientific studies. If we add wine to that healthy diet regimen you can immediately help boost your health and wellbeing in terms of the amount of antioxidants you ingest and fat managing properties you add. Wine has been shown to help heart disease, cancer, obesity and even offset dementia. These are just some of the ways that wine appreciation can contribute to your wellbeing, prevent a heart attack and even extend your lifespan. However more research needs to be done which will reveal more astounding health factors if the example of resveratrol is anything to go by as a ‘magic bullet’.

The wine industry is awash with lots of great characters and fascinating innovators. Wine is far more than just Chateau, taste, bouquet and price scale. Wine appreciation is a way of life that generates social communities and new experiences. Wine is an art form imbued throughout with an alchemy from the earth and the sun. This alchemy is imparted to us through the medium of wine. This same alchemy can heal us and the ancients in their universal wisdom have long known this. Modern people are described as suffering a form of starvation that is called ‘Dionysian’ that wine is said to cure. This starvation refers not just to food hunger but a hunger for the joy of life itself which is very prevalent in a society today that lives to work rather than works to live.

China is fast becoming a producer of wine and Hong Kong has now become the centre of fine wine auctioning, surpassing New York. How we influence the global wine industry as the people who buy wine, such as opting for organic green wine, can hugely influence how they develop. In doing so, we can also help sustain the global ecosystem and inspire a green movement within China with the new young generation of wine makers on their way.

Wine is also under threat from climate change and the industry could entirely disappear within 20 years if we don’t reduce levels of greenhouse gases in our environment. Due to global warming, alcohol levels are increasing which is changing the traditional taste of wines. Vineyards are being affected and some even destroyed in flooding and fires from the instability of the weather systems due to climate change. We don’t need to wait that long to see this outcome. Australian vineyards have already suffered terribly from climate instability in recent years. The good news is we now have the first carbon zero winery and a bodega in Spain is heated using geothermal power from the earth. So it can be done.

The industry also needs to stop looking in the mirror and start looking out the window. For far too long the industry has been a bit stagnant and not directly engaging with consumers.

There are now over 14 million conversations about wine taking place online every year in social media. Part of this fear of engaging with the consumers is about losing profit margins by enthusiasts who judge wine quality in terms of price when there has been no other evaluation method. Wine in glass bottles is no longer sustainable or acceptable to enthusiasts who have an ‘eco conscience’ and most of them now do.

Wine enthusiasm will save lives, catalyze social communities and could even revolutionize agriculture. The wine industry could take the lead and cover all vineyards in healthy living soil rather than the dead soil and monoculture it currently manages which needs ever more fertilizers and dangerous pesticides. They could, in fact, initiate a movement that would eventually trap all the excess CO2 in the atmosphere which is causing global warming, using a natural easy to make substance called biochar. These are just some of the exciting stories you will read about in this book.

You know, the wine purchasing power of all us enthusiasts could save the planet by opting for wine with more eco-bling. We could save ourselves in the process due to the substantial health benefits. We, the wine enthusiasts, are the wine world and we can conserve it for future generations but we need to take action now. Our green purchasing power can shape the future of wine. This is why we need to become more involved and informed about the wine we use or should use in our daily life.

As an Irish person, I am also inspired by the effect Irish people have had on the wine industry the world over. The Irish diaspora, such as the Lynch Chateaux in Bordeaux, MacMahon in Burgundy, the Celtic Saints who started vineyards in Europe, the Barry and Horgan families in Australia, Francis Mahoney the ‘King of Pinot’ in the Nappa Valley and Jim Barrett, the owner of the Californian vineyard Chateaux Montelena. Barrett produced the Chardonnay that was the wine that stunned the critics at the historic Judgment of Paris - a landmark blind tasting that changed the world of wine forever. Wines of caliber, after this event, were accepted to be in the new world as much as the old. I hope that this book I have written continues the tradition of the contribution of Irish people to wine culture.

The wine universe is very exciting, interesting and well worth your exploration through the lens of NutriWine. So here’s to your health. Slainte! That’s Irish for a toast to your health and wellbeing.

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1: The Wine Mind

If you’re a wine enthusiast it’s really important that we establish who you are - as YOU are the world of wine.

You take 38 seconds to decide what bottle of wine you want to buy.

You are particularly attracted to wines with medals on their labels. What the psychology of your mind appreciates about wine in terms of seeing, tasting, smelling, thinking and most of all buying, perhaps even believing, drives the industry both in culture and innovation. Psychology Professor Larry Lockshin found that it takes you this time on average to buy your bottle of wine and much of that decision is based on what the label is and its design.¹ More than ever we want wellbeing, escape from stress, relaxation and meaning.

Wine appreciation delivers on all three. The world of wine is easy to understand, enjoy and belong to with a few basic pieces of information. The first place to start your journey is to know who exactly drinks wine and why? After all, in the USA alone there are over 80 million of you.² Globally over 26 billion liters of wine is consumed annually.³

The Wine Enthusiast

Every month you wine enthusiasts drink wine in:

-  the USA once a week

-  the UK once every month - lots of women drinkers

-  Australia 21 glasses per month⁴

-  China at the weekends socially by young professionals or at banquets.

You would all drink more, you say, if you knew more about wine and could easily get that information in a way that was not education. If you’re a man wine is about status and success; if you’re a woman then it’s about socializing and in fact 80% of all wine now purchased in the UK is by women.⁵ If you have an oenological ‘instinctual drift’ or wine mind in the U.S. then you will be living generally in the east coast and have a professional career.

The three words that are key to being a wine enthusiast are color, smell and taste. People who like to explore wine for relaxation are as much enthusiasts as the ones who love the world of wine as a pet subject or who become sommeliers. You are the ones buying all the wine. The world of wine has lots more than the history of the Chateaux to offer you. There are wine pairing, health benefits, new wine makers, technology and a green organic movement full of eco-bling. Something for everyone.

You don’t have to make tasting notes to be an enthusiast; you just have to be interested in taste. Don’t think the world of wine requires you to swirl wine and start spouting poetic descriptions as such as ‘dark as Madagascar’ and ‘flavors unravel like a striptease’. With a bit of exploration, like knowing the wine regions and grapes, you could deepen your choice. Right now the vast majority of you base your purchasing decisions on price scale. High priced wines are better, and cheap wines are just that. But are they? What about the taste? Aroma? What region? What is the grape? What is the terroir or land they have been grown in? Have you ever asked yourself what wines you actually like? Taking some time to explore this would be great. As the ad says - ‘You’re worth it’.

You might like wines from a particular region like Bergerac rather than Bordeaux. Your wine may be cheaper on the scale but that does not mean cheap in ‘experience’ which is what you truly value if you are a millennial. The flavors will all be there and by a great winemaker and vineyard too perhaps. Price does not reflect totally on quality or individual experience or reflect the meaning of the wine for you or your friends. Price is not a guarantee on quality totally. You have to develop your nose and connect with some great winemakers and vineyards.

By exploring different wines, imagine, you can taste the world. Even if you have a regional wine favorite one can still explore and find other likes from a whole range of wines. Plus you get to socialize and have fun. If you always drink what you always partake of in terms of wine that is all you will get. Go lateral - as the mind once stretched never regains its original shape.

Generation X & Millennial Digital Natives

There is one of two groups you will generally belong to with your wine enthusiast peers – the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers or ‘Millennials’. If you were born before 1980 you’re in the Xer’s 35 – 46 age set and if it’s after, you’re with the Millennials. The two groups have very interesting psychological outlooks when it comes to wine. If you’re generation X, then your appreciation of wine is with food and dining. Wine is the reward at the weekend for all the hard work and helps you to relax and unwind. As you get older you seem to get into